“Ah, you are laughing at me. But you don’t know, you can’t guess——”
Thurso came close up to him and pressed his arm. The latent hostility was all gone; here was a friend who should be told what he was missing. So easy was it to get out of hell into purgatory, and through purgatory past the unbarred gates of a Paradise of rose and gold. No flaming-sworded angel was there; a glass and a bottle were the pass-word for admittance. You had but to draw a stopper, chink a glass, and drink, and the whole world was changed. The thought invaded and encompassed him. He could think of nothing but that.
“Suppose you try it one night,” he said to Cochrane, “when you are staying down here, as you will be to-morrow? You just see; there’s no need for any healing any more—the thing is health and life. I say, wouldn’t it be funny if, after I had come over here to be cured by you, I succeeded in pulling you after me. Just try some night.”
Bertie Cochrane nodded at him.
“Well, it may come to that,” he said; “there’s nothing which you can say is impossible.”
Thurso laughed again.
“Maud too, perhaps,” he said. “What a good time we might have: ‘up to heaven all three,’ as it says in that poem by—by—I never can remember names now!”
Cochrane could barely restrain a little shudder of disgust at this, but he checked it.
“Well, you’re making an excellent start,” he said, “because you’re telling me all your plans for the future, just as you have told me all the history of the past. And as for the present, I can figure that up pretty correctly now. Now, do you know what you’ve been doing for this last ten minutes? You’ve been almost forcing yourself to do what you say you are going to do by imagining it. Every action begins in the brain. But just before that another action began. You said, ‘Ah, help me!’ Do you remember that?”
“Yes, but it’s useless,” said Thurso. “You see for yourself.”